The HP TouchPad story [so far]

The HP tablet caused surprises over the past six months, then dusted, buried, caused mass hysteria, and brought another surprise. That's all in a nutshell, it doesn't sound adventurous!

To put it a little bit, the thing looks like when HP got into financial trouble in 2009, came and bought the whole company, the sale and purchase closed about a year ago after all the official bodies gave their blessing to the acquisition. HP’s main goal was to acquire webOS, as it is one of the most advanced mobile operating systems. The current version of webOS is 3.0, with which the tablet that everyone already knows or has heard its name from, if not from elsewhere, is on the weekly discount catalog.

The tablet, called the TouchPad, was unveiled in early February, and the final commercial launch came on July 1st. The iron itself has attractive parameters, the central unit is manufactured by Qualcomm, in the latest simplified classification it belongs to Snapdragon S3, which marks the best SoCs currently available in the manufacturer's product range. Specifically, we are dealing with the APQ8060 chip, which has a 1,2 GHz core with 2 ARMv7 core counters, 1 GB of DDR2 memory and perhaps the smartest Adreno 220 graphics processor on the market. takes care of. Depending on the size of the storage, two versions are available; Available in 16 GB and 32 GB versions. And its display has just the same parameters as many others, but you don't have to think about the Chinese category here either, 9,7 × 1024 pixels line up in not very crowded lines at 768 ″, but it's not a bad display because IPS technology so it’s very similar to Apple’s product, for example, which currently accounts for a large share of the market.

But then what was the problem? There will never be a real answer to this, of course, but first and foremost we need to associate it with software, as currently Android is a much better system overall and Apple is Apple, so Palm’s webOS was definitely one of the Achilles heels of the machine. Furthermore, it did not reach all the markets, among other things it could not be obtained from us (at least at the service provider), the price was also a bit high, but there was no particular problem there, with its $ 399 fecni it is not an expensive model at all, but it could be cheaper for a success founder with a new software. And from here we get to the phase where mass hysteria replaced silence.

On August 22, the news came with the crowd that HP products are in every warehouse and column. And the next day, everyone wanted to buy an HP machine! To put it mildly, a sensational campaign has begun, thanks to which in a few hours it has become the most sought-after product in its category, so much so that in 2-3 days it all sold out. At least that's what the stores said. BestBuy gave the 99GB version for $ 16 and the 150GB version for $ 32, which is now almost free, in exchange for such a product. In England, too, special prices awaited customers, if not for HUF 19, but for the equivalent of HUF 000, anyone could take the smaller model home. Price dumping has subsided, stocks have been depleted, as they cannot produce for that, even though it runs out well if the cost of production is over $ 28.

Software problems - which are certainly not real problems - seem to be solved by now, which means you can put your Android software on your tablet. This was treated even in the low priced phase, as I mentioned here was one of the weak points. Sure, the fully functional Android software isn’t ready yet, but one of the best teams has seen it back that anno, in the normal price period, and thanks to the promotions, they’re working on it with all their might now. THE Team-Touchdroid You can now continuously monitor the current state of the system, CyanogenMod7 is running on it, which is based on 2.3.5. You can now get the system to do dual-boot based on the videos, but Android is still very far from usable. We are curious to see what the makers will finally get.

The story has no end, everyone thought that was the Calvary of the TouchPad, but the latest news shows something different again. HP is pretty hard to follow lately. They announce in August that they will no longer manufacture, after which they will scatter almost all for free, and then change their minds because the sales were good for $ 99 - a bit perhaps ironic - which the company is doing lately. In any case, the TouchPad is nowhere near over and the next shipment will arrive, how much and for how much is not yet known, but according to information close to the outside company, HP will do better than not take over the ordered parts, or would not use it from outside manufacturers. According to some unconfirmed sources, they still have enough parts to produce more than 100 pieces, including the 000 ″ machine, which has not yet been released. Sure, the story of the TouchPad isn’t over yet, but we’ll remember it for a long time and it could start unexpected processes in the entire history of HP.

Source: hp,  team-touchdroid